


I Can Give You Dirt Covered Hands

by RunWithWolves



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, clarke always has dirty hands, wanheda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 19:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6207343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunWithWolves/pseuds/RunWithWolves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke walks away from Arcadia with the sun in her eyes, The Mountain at her back, and hands that are far cleaner than they should be considering the blood dripping off them. So she buries them in the dirt and the name Wanheda is whispered through the trees. But even in the silence of the forest, Clarke can't escape Lexa and the question she brings,</p>
<p>If Clarke's hands are dirty, how does Lexa keep her own so clean?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can Give You Dirt Covered Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Because I couldn't get past the parallels between Clarke and Lexa and how they mirror each other in story and style.

Clarke takes her first step away from camp, her friends and family falling behind her, and stares down at her fingers. She flexes the digits slowly, then runs one finger down her palm and nearly shudders at the softness of her own skin in a world so rough. Her finger leaves an invisible trail, mapping lifelines and lovelines and deathlines like constellations in the sky she once belonged to. 

Clarke doesn’t know how her hands can look so clean. 

She keeps walking without looking up. Truthfully, Clarke doesn’t need to. She was meant to be the girl who fell from the stars and right now, there is only one star in the sky. So she follows its brightness and chases the path of sunlight through the branches. 

She’d once taken pride in the way she drew sunlight falling on a ground that she’d never actually seen. From crayon sketches that her father bent the rules to let her make to sketches drawn in ash in a solitary cell. He always gave her things to draw with.

Laughing at the ash or wax or graphite smearing her fingertips. 

“Let’s clean that up, baby girl,” Clarke breaks the quiet murmur of the forest to whispers the words he’d always said as he gave her a smile. Then he’d take her into the bathroom and softly rub her hands clean with a rag. 

Today her hands are spotless as she stumbles through the wood with a mountain at her back and nothing in her pockets to help her survive. She doesn’t need more. She doesn’t deserve more. 

She killed an entire mountain without more. 

Clarke doesn’t know how her hands can look so clean. 

Her mother always insisted on clean hands. She worked in a hospital; Clarke worked in a hospital.

Clarke keeps trudging through the forest, fingers tracing her palms, and whispers her mother’s words, “If you don’t keep them clean,” her mom had said, “then the dirt will transfer and everyone around you will get infected.”

Even on the Arc, Clarke had tried so hard to keep her hands clean. Washing two, three, four times in the sink before presenting them to her mother. Her mom would look them over and, if she found a single spot, take her back to the bathroom and help her get the speck of dirt off. 

“If you see dirt,” her mom had said, giving Clarke a small smile as she scrubbed softly at Clarke’s nail beds, “then you know to be careful of someone.”

And her mother would wipe her hands clean. They’d get to work. Side by side to give what relief they could to the patients. Clarke was a healer. A giver. The blood washing easily off her fingers after surgery or wrapping a new dressing or simply easing a pain. 

Today Clarke doesn’t know how her hands can look so clean. 

She loses sight of the sun for but a moment and crashing into a tree trunk. 

Her finger freezes on her palm and her laughter bubbles up as more of a cry, tears pulling at her eyes as though they can leap out and wash her hands clean. “Mom,” Clarke says, voice raspy as she collapses against the uneven bark of the tree, “Mom, my hands got dirty and no-one can tell.”

There is no response. 

Just a tear leaking out to track down her cheek. Perhaps there is enough dirt on her face that the tear will leave tracks and someone will notice. Someone will see. Because otherwise tears disappear. The vanish into pillows and shirt sleeves. Lost to the night and the stars and the sky. 

That’s what leaders do. And Clarke gave herself to being a leader. A leader whose people and allies kept insisting that she wasn’t actually their leader and then blaming her when she didn’t take control. A tumultuous relationship at best, a far cry from the iron grip of the Commander. 

Lexa wouldn’t cry. That was weakness. 

Maybe that was the difference, Clarke gave in when her people demanded. Lexa took her role. Taking lives and armies and whatever she needed for her people to survive. 

Took armies away. 

And yet Lexa’s hands were clean. Clarke’s fingers clasp onto tree branches and she can still see Lexa sitting on her twisted throne, words firm “You’re the one who burned 300 of my soldiers alive.” 

Fingers as shiny and spotless as the knife blade spinning her grasp, so ready to take. Clarke’s life. Clarke’s people. Whatever it took. The Commander takes. 

Clarke gave. 

That day Clarke gave an offer, a first proposal to beat the mountain men. Not knowing it would only increase the dirt on her hands from the 300 grounders she had just burned alive to add an entire civilization. One simple offer to save them leading to nothing but so many deaths. 

Clarke doesn’t know how her hands can look so clean.

Clarke is Sky Crew where Lexa is of the ground. Perhaps Clarke’s tears were always meant to vanish. Stars are beautiful as long as you don’t get too close to their heat, their power, running on gas until they shoot their flames and particles and atoms into the universe. 

To give form to planets made of dirt. 

The stars burn and planets rise. 

Clarke drops, lunges, thrusts her hands into the mud at her feet, taking it between her fingers. 

Her hands come up dirty. 

She makes no effort to wipe the dirt away.

#

Her hands are never clean after that, fingers scrambling in the dirt as she fights to survive. Slime from the frogs she learns to catch. She lets entrails from the animals she kills coat her palms. Crushing berries between her fingers and her teeth. Colouring her hair with blood and dirt. So people can see. So it’s tangible. 

And people notice. 

Soon the word starts to filter through the forest. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

“What does it mean?” Clarke has heard the word several times but only stops to ask one of Lexa’s warriors, a young second, when she feels as though it’s following her from village to village. 

“The Skai girl,” the warrior’s English is broken, “she who made the mountain fall, they say she is Wanheda.”

Clarke has learned not to give expression to her feelings, “why call her Wanheda?” she asks. 

“Because she brings death,” he says. 

Nodding, Clarke says nothing more. Her memories flashing past of the days when they called her healer, calling for her giver. Her lips stay closed and her hands stay dirty until she returns to the forest and the sanctity of the trees that cut out the view of the stars themselves. Then she breaks her silence. 

“Wanheda,” she whispers, “Wanheda.”

The dirt is caked across her palms. 

#

Some days, when her store of game is plentiful and the woods are silent, Clarke draws tallies over her arm. Taking mud from the edge of the river and tracing thin lines up and down her skin, the only drawing she’s done since her mother had charcoal sent to her cell. A far cry from the crayons given to her by her father. 

She never has enough skin.

Clarke starts with her arms. 

Wells is always first. A lone tally mark of the boy she failed to save, the boy she let die because she taught a little girl how to hold a knife. Because she was not a friend. When he died they were at war with themselves and Clarke had to give herself to a leadership race she never wanted that only ended in division. 

The second tally is the little girl who killed her best friend. 

The arm fills up faster now. 320 tally marks for the innocents who gave their lives on the Arc because Clarke couldn’t contact them. Couldn’t tell them. Couldn’t warn them. When they died Clarke was standing on a bridge and gave herself over to trying to start a peace treaty that would only end in war. 

She’s halfway up her second arm when she has to add another 300 marks. The 300 grounder warriors who burned around the dropship because she gave the order to burn them alive. 

The 300 that The Commander first threw in her face when they met. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

She has to move across her collarbones and then to her left leg to finish them off, then she adds a few more for the members of her own people who died in Mount Weather. Bled alive before she could get to them. She gave them hope in that mountain and then left them behind. 

One mark for Anya. The Grounder who trusted her and then was shot by Clarke’s own people after Clarke gave her word that it would be different this time. 

Sometimes the single lines weigh the most. 

She draws 18 lines for the innocent people murdered in her name by a boy who thought he loved her. They’re each a little larger than the rest. Their layer of dirt thicker. She had no quarrel with them but what she gave Finn was passed on them. 

What she gave Finn, killed him as well. She deviates from her pattern. A single tally in the same place she slipped the knife. She thought she was giving him love but at the end, all she had to give was death. 

So many tallies and Finn is the first where there was blood visible on her hands when the task was done. All the rest killed by bullets or distance or hands that weren’t hers but had been touched by her or even mercy.

But Finn turned her fingers red. 

Her stomach gets the marks of the town. An entire city of grounders dead by a missile. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

Clarke stops to trace a W across her palms. 

A little bit of the dirt comes with her, mixed with the fresh mud as she moves to her last limb. It is coated in tallies. Big lines for the children. Small lines for the adults. Every face a fuzzy memory in her mind and some are even more. People like Maya, freezing her finger as a river rushes over her. The marks coat her skin, covering it. Mud drying across her skin in the only kind of art she can bring herself to make on the ground. 

She never has enough skin to finish. 

She always loses count. Her finger always trembles. 

Eventually she simply drops, slumping down into the mud. Tomorrow she will get up. Tomorrow she will be strong, killing jungle cats with her bare hands and letting bloody entrails fall across her hands. Tomorrow.

Today she is just dirty. 

She is Wanheda. 

#

She kills the cat. 

She still feels dirty. 

They still whisper. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda.

Cat dead on the ground before her. 

If Lexa saw her, which name would she use? The hard ‘K’s of Clarke or the soft roll of ‘W’ and ‘H’. Clarke starts sawing slowly with the knife, watching as skin peels back slowly from muscle as though the two were never linked together. Clarke just manages to remove the pelt of the great cat, when she remembers The Commander’s choice of name shouldn’t matter. 

Lexa’s hands were clean. 

The Mountain didn’t dirty Lexa.

#

But it should have. Clarke wonders how Lexa’s hands can be so clean. The Commander of thousands of warriors with fingers as clean as her knife. Even Clarke’s knife can’t stay clean, a simple blade given in exchange for a fresh pelt. She slips it from its sheath to cut the flesh from another creature, a small bunny, hopelessly caught in her trap. 

There is always blood on the metal no matter how many times she tries to wipe it clean on her shirt. 

A dirty blade is of no good to anyone. 

“Let’s clean that up, baby girl,” her father had said. Every time she tries the dirt from her shirt mixes with the blood on the blade and both just end up a mess. 

A dirty blade corrodes and rusts and shows a weakness of the mind, spreading to warriors who follow the girl who holds it. Once upon a time, the only weapon she’d held was a scalpel, cutting flesh to give life. Each blade sterile in her perfect fingers. 

“If you see dirt,” her mom had said, “then you know to be careful of someone.”

Clarke wonders how her hands could have looked so clean. 

Bellamy. Her mother. Kane. Perhaps she should have taken them with her, no way to know if she left in time or if she’d already given them too much. Infected with her dirty fingers. 

Finn should make it abundantly clear what happens when Clarke gives. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

Lexa is just Heda. 

#

The Commander favours her sword. A blade. All grounders do. She swings the shining metal and and takes life at her discretion, blood dripping off the blade to sink into the ground itself. 

Clarke always used a gun. Giving a quick pull of the trigger to send a bullet soaring on it’s way. A gift from her to the target. 

Blood nowhere near her. 

And yet Lexa’s hands are the ones that look clean. 

#

Clarke finds herself in the river by necessity, not only does she require the water it provides but there is good eating in the fish contained within its banks. Her feet wash clean as she steps into the water’s embrace but every time she wiggles her toes Clarke can still feel the mud squish between them. 

She’s not particularly good at fishing. 

Lexa had once promised to teach her should she ever come to Polis. A promise born of ‘not yet’ and shattered on a mountainside as Lexa took her people and left. 

Hours are lost splashing in the river with nothing more than a sharpened stick to spear the water as the fish curl around her feet. She’s pretty sure they’re mocking her. Silver flashing between the current as she can’t even figure out how to take the life of a simple fish. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda.

Growing in frustration, Clarke moves on. She collects her meager gear and walks alongside the river, toes still squishing in the mud. Dirt collecting all over again as her shoes stay thrown over her shoulder, thumping against her back with every step. Clarke twirls the sad excuse for a spear as she walks. The weapon still foreign in her hands. 

But there’s no good way to fish with a knife and she’s getting tired of eating deer. 

With the hope of a shallow pool collecting in an eddy of the river, she carries on. There’s something pathetic in the idea that The Mighty Wanheda can’t take the life of a fish. 

Somehow it irks her. The councillor's perfect daughter that she once was rearing it’s head from somewhere inside her. The girl from the sky who wasn’t accustomed to losing. Ironically, even on the ground she’s never lost. Outliving or outplaying her enemies one by one. 

Except these stupid fish. 

She loses sight of the river for a few minutes, detouring through the forest to avoid climbing the slippery rocks of a near-waterfall. The sound follows her, the pounding of water on rock. Cleansing. Grinding. 

Something catches between the roar of the water. Strangled. Higher pitched. 

Something human. Something weak.

“Help.”

Clarke was a healer before the they changed her name. She lunges forward on instinct, letting branches whip her in the face as she burst through the trees at the top of the small waterfall. Her eyes are charting and cataloguing and diagnosing before she can even think it through. The familiar burst of adrenaline running through her veins. 

She sees the blood first. 

“Help,” the girl’s voice is strangled, carrying weak and thin sound no farther than Clarke’s ears. 

“Hey now,” Clarke says, the water sinks into her pants to pluck at the skin of her thighs before she can even think about whether or not she wants to jump in the river. “Hey now,” she repeats, kneeling in the river beside the girl. The grounder. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

The blood turns the water red around them, the lightest shade tinting every molecule it touches before whisking away as though it was never there at all. Clarke rips back the heavy fabric of the girl’s shirt, easily spotting the knife wound puncturing between the ribs on her right side. It’s deep and messy. 

But Clarke’s seen deeper and messier. 

“It’s going to be okay,” Clarke says, “I’m a healer.” In that moment, it doesn’t feel like a lie. 

The girl’s hand jerks in the air for a moment before landing on Clarke’s leg. It presses down. Squeezes. Blood from the wound coming with it. 

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere,” Clarke says, ripping the girl’s shirt a little farther, “Do you have a name?”

“Ryiel,” the names comes out on a groan and a shudder. 

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ryiel,” Clarke says. Her hands stay busy, ripping the girl’s shirt into bandages. She’s seen this before, stitches would be ideal but a tight bandage will do the job. Clarke gives Ryiel a smile and the dirt on her cheeks cracks at the unexpected motion, “You’re going to live to have one impressive scar.”

Ryiel stares at for a moment then accepts the smile and tentatively offers one in return. 

Clarke rips the last bandage to size and gives the girl another smile. A smile perfected by a hundred different hospital beds, a twinge of the real thing mixed with a dose of professionalism, “We’ll just clean this up,” Clarke says, “and then wrap you up.”

Her hands reach towards the wound. 

And Clarke freezes. 

The dirt is still caked across her palms, her constant companion for months past. Layer upon layer of earth stuck under her nails and embedded in her skin. The water has turned it moist but it’s still entrenched in the cracks that make her lifelines and lovelines and death lines. Swirls of red and black and brown and grey that each tell a story about where her hands have been. 

“If you see dirt,” her mom had said, “then you know to be careful of someone.”

There’s a hint of her skin poking out between the brown, the first Clarke’s seen of it since she buried her hands in the mud after the Mountain fell before her and she gave a simple pull of a lever. The skin is pale. Damp. The water of the river jumped up to clear the spot, wetting the dirt around it so it turned to mud and shifted in tiny rivers of it’s own over her palms. Water turning her lifelines and lovelines and deathlines into tiny riverbeds. 

“Let’s clean that up, baby girl,” her father had said

Clarke’s not sure she’s ready to see her hands again. 

But the girl groans and Clarke’s head snaps up automatically. Before they called her anything else she was a healer. A giver. Whatever her people needed, that’s what Clarke would offer. Maybe the names are wrong. 

She dunks her hands in the river. Running quickly through the routine blazed in her memory as though her mother’s hands are still guiding her own, so not one speck of dirt can escape. After a moment, she pulls them back out and drops of water fall from her palms to disappear into the water below. 

Clarke doesn’t know how her hands can look so clean. 

Turning to her patient, Clarke probes the wound and then begins wrapping. She mutters soft reassurances as she works, pressure perfect. Giving small smiles when Ryiel grimaces at the action, small pieces of herself that she can offer to make the process a little easier. 

With the bandage secure, they emerge from the water together and Ryiel’s arm clasps at Clarke’s neck while Clarke holds her by the waist. The most contact she’s had since leaving the camp. The smile she gives is the most genuine thing Clarke has felt in longer. 

Ryiel insists on thanking her, slowly building a small fire to roast a fish despite the hole in her side. 

Clarke goes back in the river. She still fails to catch a fish even with Ryiel’s instruction. 

The fire stays while they eat berries. 

Curling up beside the fire, Clarke gives Ryiel one last smile before closing her eyes. Clean hands pressed together. 

#

Ryiel doesn’t wake up. 

When Clarke pulls back the bandage, the green lines of infection greet her. 

She finds a single speck of dirt in the nailbed of her left hand.

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

#

Clarke sits beside the body for two days and stares at that single speck of dirt. Sparks of the fire long burned out and heat long disappeared from the corpse. She sits and she stares and she thinks. 

She gave the girl smiles and reassurance and years of training and everything Clarke knew about healing. She gave that girl the most love she’d given in months and she’d still died. Died. Died. Died. Like all the ones who came before. Just another tally mark on a body that had no room for more tallies. 

They keep dying. 

Clarke wants them to stop dying. She has no more room for tallies. She wants clean hands again. She doesn’t deserve clean hands. 

Clarke looks at her fingers and softly touches the speck of dirt. 

She wants hands that are actually clean, not hands that look clean but are actually so dirty. There’s only one place she can go for answers. Only one person who has clean hands and yet a tally that would require more marks than Clarke. Another leader. Who shares a town’s worth of tally marks with her. 

With hands as clean as her knife. 

So Clarke searches her memory for the difference. The difference between herself and Lexa that leaves one of them covered in dirty and the other clean. 

Wanheda and Heda. 

She finds the right memory at the end of the two days, circling back to the beginning. The village. Their first truly shared death. A lesson ignored as Finn burned on a pyre before them with 18 other dead. 

“I thought I’d never get over the pain,” Lexa had said, the hush in her voice the only indication that she was speaking of a girl she had once loved. Dead too soon. “But I did.” the Commander had continued.

“How?” Clarke remembers how the question had floated off her tongue. Almost involuntarily. Without looking at the girl beside her while the body of a boy smoldered before them. The same question. Always the question. 

She almost snorts. The question she asked then the same one she holds today. 

The Commander always seemed to have an answer, “By recognizing love for what it is,” Lexa had said, “Weakness.”

“So you just stopped caring? About everyone?” Clarke had said. 

The Clarke sitting by the river almost manages a chuckle at the skepticism that had crept into her voice when she’d asked. That Clarke hadn’t brought down a mountain. That Clarke hadn’t been betrayed. That Clarke hadn’t even had time to grieve the boy burning in front of her as a potential alliance loomed overhead. 

The Commander had simply nodded at her question. Something in Clarke’s memory speaks of a twinge. A swallow. An involuntary action that spoke louder than the Commander’s intended act. Something that said maybe Lexa wasn’t as committed to the idea as she’d pretended to be. 

Something that spoke of dirt. 

Once, she’d looked at Lexa and told The Commander that she knew Lexa had cared. 

But today Clarke didn’t care. As the river rushed past her from glaciers in the north to empty in some far off sea, she didn’t care about The Commander. About Lexa. 

The Commander abandoned her by a mountain. Took her ‘not yet’ and turned it into a ‘never’. 

Took. Took. Took. 

The Commander does not give. She takes. They call her Heda and her hands are clean. 

Clarke has done nothing but give. She never takes. They call her Wanheda and her hands are dirty. 

The answer seems so simple once it’s find. Lexa takes life. Clarke gives death. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

Lexa owes her for the mountain. She’d take this lesson. Payment in kind. 

Stop giving. Love is weakness. She buries her hands back in the dirt, coating them in the ground that doesn’t not belong to her. She is of the Sky. They are grounders. 

Clarke finally learns to take. 

Her hands are dirty. 

A warning. All she has to give is death.

#

So she practices. Clarke takes from the land around her, bending it to her will so that she not only survives but flourishes. She takes plants and crushes them between her teeth. She takes berries and turns them into dye. She takes the life of animals around her for more than just food. She takes their lives and peddles them for nothing but a few supplies. 

The only thing she does not take is water. She drinks what she needs directly from the river and drinks not a drop more. Letting the dirt cling to her body.

She’ll take the ground. The ground belongs to The Commander and the Commander owes her more than anyone. She can take the ground. 

The water is something else. 

The water cleans. Clarke is not ready to be clean. First she was to learn to take. Take like Lexa does. 

So she takes. She takes what is given without offering back anything more than she has to. When a girl who really should know better offers herself to Clarke’s pleasure, Clarke takes. She takes the raw release. The momentary enjoyment. The moment of forgetting even though the stars are out and Clarke is supposed to be born of stars. She takes what the girl is willing to give. 

She takes. 

Clarke gave once. 

And she was left on a Mountain. 

Now they call her Wanheda and say that the only thing she has left to give is death. 

So if she cannot give. She will take. Selfishly. Foolishly. Without apology. Without remorse. Without emotion. Take from the ground and take from the grounder. The ground does not belong to stars and Clarke belongs to neither. So she just takes. 

Her hands stay dirty, her hair turns red. 

And she takes. 

#

Until she is taken herself. Tied and trussed and slapped on the back of a horse with a gag in her mouth because she will not come easily. Coming easily would involve giving. 

And Clarke doesn’t give. 

Clarke takes. The Commander taught her that.   
So she fights. Even when she is taken. 

#

Clarke doesn’t give an inch and her hands stay dirty.

The man who takes her survives. 

To give her away. 

#

Given to The Commander. Of course. Her feet could tread a thousand paths through a thousand woods and apparently she would always come back to this same point. 

Same girl.

They force her to her knees and Clarke barely holds back a snarl. Her eyes catalogue Lexa without her permission and find The Commander cleaner than she’s ever been. Hands and face clear of anything even resembling dirt while Clarke is forced to kneel before her covered in dirt and blood.

Clarke gets an answer to a question that Lexa never knew had been asked when the first words off Lexa’s tongue are, “Hello, Clarke.”

The hard ‘K’s ringing out. 

She’d scoff if there wasn’t a gag in her mouth. Instead, Clarke kneels as tall as she is able and matches Lexa’s gaze forced to look as Lexa stares down. Clarke will not bow her head, she will not give her respect to the might Commander. 

She will take her own. She is Wanheda. 

Even kneeling before them, they should be afraid of what she has to give. So she waits. She watches, learns. Takes the information they give her. A Prince Roan. Indra. Titus. They all call her Wanheda. They all understand. 

Lexa uses the name only in reference, never addressing her as such. 

The Commander takes another prisoner, locking up the man who took Clarke first. The circle folds in on itself like the loops of infinity. Lexa leaves Clarke. Roan takes Clarke. Lexa takes Roan. 

Lexa takes Clarke. 

Until The Commander orders her back up, giving the command to help Clarke back to her feet. She removes Clarke’s gag and offers an apology. Her fingers are soft, barely brushing the edges of Clark’s skin before floating away. Clarke hardly hears her. Hardly feels her. Lungs focused on taking in air past a tongue covered in dirt. Eyes focused on the woman before her. 

“I’m sorry,” Lexa says.

Clarke continues her stare. Breathing hard. Something flicking through her head that speaks of Lexa giving an apology. But she crushes it. Eyes focused. Locked. On the dirt. 

Lexa’s fingers were clean when they touched her face, now they show the faintest tinge of dirt and blood. Moving from Clarke to Lexa. 

“If you see dirt,” her mom had said, “then you know to be careful of someone.”

A smudge of dirt on Lexa’s fingers. 

It’s not enough. Clarke shifts her hands where they are still locked in manacles, pressing her palms together and feeling the dirt compressed deeper into her lifelines and lovelines and deathlines. Sun glaring through the window just behind Lexa’s head. 

She’s followed the direction of the sun for months. 

“I had to make sure Wanheda didn’t fall into the hands of the ice queen,” Lexa continues, “I need you.”

Wanheda. 

The Commander again references her as Wanheda without addressing her. Then asks for her help. Asks for her to give. Knowing her title but uses it as though she has no idea what it means. She asks Clarke to give. Give. Knowing that Clarke only has one thing left after Lexa left her standing on a Mountain alone and took her army away with her. Forcing Clarke to give the lever a simple pull. 

The Commander asks her to give. 

Lexa looks at her and for the first time in months, Clarke wants to. 

She is Wanheda and there is only one thing she can give and she is willing to give it to the woman who takes as much as she does.The Commander asks for a gift from the The Commander of Death. Lexa is clean and asks Clarke, with dirty cheeks and palms and hands, to give. 

Clarke spits. 

There is dirt from the gag on her tongue and she sends it splashing across Lexa’s clean face. Then Clarke lunges after it, shoving her dirty, her worn, her tired, her bloody body towards the pristine cleanliness that is the Commander. 

“Let’s clean that up, baby girl,” her father had said. 

She ignores him. He’s dead. As dead as the girl who left a bloody handprint on Clarke’s pants. 

The blood should be Lexa’s. The dirt and grime and red and black and brown should all be smeared across the Commander like trails of nonsensical colour that somehow form constellations. 

Wanheda. Wanheda. Wanheda. 

Clarke lunges forward but The Commander doesn’t take a step back. Guards taking Clarke’s arms and hauling her back and away. Lexa wipes the spit away and Clarke can only hope it’s too late. That Lexa is already infected with the only thing Clarke has to offer. One day, she’ll just be another tally. 

Lexa asked her to give. 

“You bitch,” Clarke has more to give, throwing the words and feelings forward, even as she is dragged back. Taken away. “You wanted the Commander of Death? You’ve got her.”

She’ll give Lexa exactly what she’s asking for, “I’ll kill you.” Clarke screams the words for Lexa to take, sending them soaring down the hall to the woman she can’t see anymore, “I’ll kill you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally supposed to turn into a fix-it fic because from a storyline persepctive there were parallels that I was expected them to build to that never happened. Sadly, I didn't have time to sit down and write a full 10,000 words. Is this something people would want to see the other side of?
> 
> Your comments, kudos and [ tumblr stop-ins ](http://ariabauer.tumblr.com/) are always appreciated. Never stop supporting each other. 
> 
> Stay stupendous <3 Aria


End file.
